[WikiEN-l] Anonymous page creation will be reenabled on English Wikipedia.

[Florence Devouard]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> In December 2005 during the John Seigenthaler biography controversy
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy)
> it was decided to require that users create an account and log in
> before starting a new article.  The ability of people to make changes
> without logging in remained unchanged.
> 
> Some people believed that Wikipedia's the high rate of growth may have
> outpaced its community's ability to monitor new articles, contributing
> to the Seigenthaler problem. It was hoped that the limitation of page
> creation would increase the quality of newly created pages, increase
> oversight over newly created pages, and avoid the creation of hoax
> articles.  Since that point several attempts to study the impact of
> the change have been conducted.  These studies have been unable to
> produce conclusive findings.
> 
> Around the time of the Seigenthaler controversy Wikipedia underwent a
> dramatic and discontinuous increase in traffic and editing activity
> beyond the high rate of growth Wikipedia had long been experiencing.
> It is very likely that the press surrounding this incident contributed
> to this increase.  This increase had made it impossible to make
> conclusive statements about the impact limiting page creation.
> 
> Furthermore, if we ignore the growth effects the data suggests that
> the change has been harmful to the quality of Wikipedia. I must
> emphasize that all results have been inconclusive. We just can't tell.
> 
> Numerous discussions with Wikipedians, Foundation leaders, and
> Foundation staff going back for more than a year have generally been
> positive about the idea of re-enabling anonymous page creation.
> 
> In the time since late 2005 the English Wikipedia community has grown
> substantially. The nearly exponential growth rate in articles we
> previously experienced has stopped.  Even if disabling anon page
> creation was beneficial then, there is no current evidence suggesting
> that the change continues to be beneficial.  As such, barring
> complications, anonymous page creation will be re-enabled on English
> Wikipedia on Friday November 9th.
> 
> After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this
> decision using previously established methods (average article
> lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random
> samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community
> discussion). If there is evidence of harm, anonymous page creation
> will be disabled to collect more data and provide time for discussion.
>  If there is no significant evidence of harm, the issue will be
> evaluated again after six months. Further milestones and actions may
> be proposed at that time.
> 
> Finally the community will have the chance to make an informed
> decision on this subject. It would have been best if that had happened
> initially, but it wasn't possible then.
> 
> I hope that we can all look at this matter with optimism. If you are
> aware of a strong factually-grounded reason why this should not be
> done please provide it as soon as possible, either as a response to
> this list or emailed to me privately.  If you have ideas on additional
> measurements we can perform after making this change or if you'd like
> to volunteer your effort for helping to perform a manual new article
> quality study next month, please let me know.

Interesting...
Well, I do not know who exactly made that decision, but I am happy of 
it. I was never really convinced it was a good idea.

One thing I am very curious about is to know what the english speaking 
community will decide regarding the stable version system (display of 
flagged version, or display of current versions). I am personally VERY 
VERY much in favor of displaying the live version. But I have no idea if 
this has been discussed here and if so, what the general position was.

Anthere